CodePen

I’m not terribly good at picking a good color palette out of thin air. My go-to is a dark look with bright colored accents, but I’m wildly envious whenever I see a beautiful website with great looking colors that are very far away from what I could pull off. Sometimes, a little inspiration can go […... read more

Alex & Chris get into a fairly recent technological change at CodePen where we ditched our Elasticsearch implementation for just using our own Postgres database for search. Sometimes choices like this are more about team expertise, dev environment practicalities, and complexity tradeoffs. We fou... read more

It’s one of those weeks where I just feel like posting some specimen screenshots of new-to-me typefaces that I like and have saved.... read more

Ages ago, Firefox shipped “masonry layout” where you simply grid-template-rows: masonry; instead of defining specific rows in a grid or letting them auto-create. It wasn’t terribly powerful but it did the trick for a lot of use cases. There has been renewed interest in this the past year or so, wher... read more

Stephen and Chris hop on to talk about how we’re saving everyone from crashed browser tabs in CodePen’s 2.0 editor. One simple: Executing JavaScript can cause a browser tab to entirely lock up, preventing you from doing anything, like potentially saving your work. It can even crash other same-domain... read more

Scroll-Driven Animations are a bit closer to usable now that Safari has them in Technical Preview and Firefox has them behind a flag. Chrome has released them. Saron Yitbarek has been blogging about it for Apple, and it’s nice to see. Apple hasn’t ever been super big in the “we make educational cont... read more

Chris & Rachel hop on the show to talk about the expanded privacy (access) model in the 2.0 editor (in Private Beta as we speak). Private Pens have always been a big deal, but as private as they are, if someone has the URL, they have the URL, and it doesn’t always feel very private. […]... read more

Our very own Stephen Shaw was on an episode of Web Dev Challenge on CodeTV: Build the Future of AI-Native UX in 4 Hours. I started watching this on my computer, but then moved to my living room couch to put it on the big screen. Because it deserves it! It honestly feels like “real” […]... read more

Pins are dead! Long live bookmarks! Pins was never a good name for the feature we have on CodePen where you can mark a Pen or Collection to more quickly jump back to it from anywhere on the site. The word is too similar to “Pen” that it’s just awkward, not to mention it’s not […]... read more

It’s such a small, simple thing, but I’m very grateful that we’re getting “Gap Decorations” in CSS. Microsoft is working on “gap decorations” and have put together a nice playground to explore them, and I had a play. The idea is drawing lines where gaps would be, rather than empty space. It’s really... read more